Posted
by
timothyon Thursday June 27, 2013 @05:52PM
from the sir-you-need-to-get-back-in-line dept.

symbolset writes "Ars is reporting that Microsoft XBox One Kinect will not work on Windows PCs. It uses a proprietary connector and an adaptor will not be available. If you want Kinect for your PC you will need to buy a 'Kinect for Windows' product. Although the Kinect 1.0 for XBox 360 also had a proprietary connector it came with a USB adaptor for compatibility with older versions of the 360 that lacked the new proprietary port and PC compatibility was quickly hacked up by third parties."

..to shoot themselves in the ass with their desire to compartmentalize everything. One reason the Kinect was such a runaway success was the fact that people thought of doing imaginative things with it and stretching its operational boundaries.

they're just aping what Apple is doing. Oh Apple is dominating mp3 players with the ipod? Let's make the Zune! Apple has their own Apple stores? Let's open our Microsoft stores! Apple has proprietary connectors? Let's make proprietary connectors!

The PC Kinect will use USB 3.0, no word on power delivery, but it could be through said USB 3.0 connection. The Xbox One version won't be very different, I guess, but they might complicate things with different protocols and out of spec stuff on the Xbox One.

I guess we'll quickly know if they just used a proprietary connector and kept everything else.

Oh, come on, that had nothing to do with it selling well - 99.999% of the Kinects sold were just plugged into an Xbox 360 and used for normal console games. It was cool that it worked on a PC and they released a Windows SDK, but that had almost zero to do with the actual units sold.

..to shoot themselves in the ass with their desire to compartmentalize everything. One reason the Kinect was such a runaway success was the fact that people thought of doing imaginative things with it and stretching its operational boundaries.

Original article says they're going to release 2 different Kinects; one for Windows and one for XBox One... but hey, let's form opinions based on headlines and cherry picking quotes!

Why? The XB1 is a PC, albeit a customized one operating in a walled-garden OS environment. Both have USB so interfacing isnt an issue. Greed-based pricing/licensing is the only reason they would need two models.

Xbox is sold at a loss and subsidized by the expectation of future game sales. The kinect 2 is an amazing piece of technology, that alone is worth thousands of dollars to a researcher, whose only other options until now have been sensors from specialized industrial suppliers with limited runs and excessive prices (we're talking $5k - $10k).

What Microsoft obviously doesn't want people doing is buying an Xbox, using only the Kincect, and not buying any media. Thus Kinect for Xbox only works with Xbox, and if you want to use it for another application you don't get the subsidy. Oh how greedy.

Looking at your posting history, I'm guessing that you are a Microsoft employee. If this is true, then you really should be disclosing this fact. If not, then you are a very passionate Microsoft fan, and should be getting paid for your constant adulation!

Why are people assuming the Windows and XBox One versions will differ only in connector?

Kinect 1 was an add-on for the XBox 360. That means everything particular to Kinect had to be in the Kinect itself, for example some video processing capability. USB, after all, is a sucky interface for video transfer, and the XBox 360 had no particular capability to do the processing required by Kinect anyways.

Kinect 2 is an integrated component of XBox One, so more of its processing is almost certainly offloaded into the GPU or other components of the XBox One console. Surely this will be cheaper than having separate (and substantial) RAM and processing inside the Kinect. But obviously the Kinect for PCs cannot take the same approach.

Granted, I have no direct knowledge and am just reasoning this out. But if you're designing the console and sensor together it's hard to imagine it won't be cheaper to have a deeper integration of computing resources needed.

Also I imagine the final Kinect 2 for Windows will surely be less expensive than the new XBox. If I buy the XBox One just for the Kinect, everybody loses -- I pay extra for a console I won't use, and MS loses money on subsidizing unused hardware.

99.999% of the Kinects sold were just plugged into an Xbox 360 and used for one or two console game and then left to collect dust after a few months.

Because, neat as the technology is (and I have to give kudos to Microsoft, the Kinect is neat tech), it doesn't really add anything to most games. Hell, in most cases it is more frustrating to use the Kinect to control your character than the regular gamepad. Sure, the Kinect-enabled party-games were fun for a while - mostly to show off to your friends - but they quickly wore out their welcome as everyone gravitated towards more traditional games, be it Rock Band, Madden or Call of Duty. The most use I got out of my Kinect was when playing Mass Effect 3, and then only because yelling "quicksave" was the one thing that the Kinect made easier to do than navigating all those menus with a gamepad.

With Kinect2 built into every XBOne ot will make it easier for developers to add the technology to their games but I have strong doubts that it will make motion-control any more/useful/.